The history of my reading life (and I consider it a life, somewhat independent of my so-called “real” life) has been littered with strange and utterly intuitive encounters with what now seem, in retrospect, the very things I needed. And so, when I had just turned fourteen, and was well-built and morose, and spent long hours staring in moody silence at nothing in particular (perhaps a pimple), I came upon a poem by a dead French man (or maybe he was Polish, or a gypsy, or an alien come down from the stars) named Apollinaire. A cousin had left it on our kitchen table. She was “in college” and planning to be a nurse. She came back for it only at exam time– such was her disdain. By then, I had cached it away in my underwear drawer, and the pain of giving it back to this nurse pending was [...]
“Whatever it was I had to say,” Charles Wright writes on the first page of Littlefoot (FSG 2007), “I’ve said it.” Two years later, in 2009, Sestets, his most recent book, came out. “Instead of going over poems today,” Charles said one day a few years ago as our small, always-awestruck-in-the-presence-of-Charles-Wright class gathered around a seminar table at the University of Virginia, “I’m gonna read you some John Cage.” He then began to read John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.” “I am here,” he said, “and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” Thank god he does. If he had nothing to say at the beginning of Littlefoot, a beautiful book-length poem, then he certainly had much more nothing to say in [...]
Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski You do what you want, I’ll do what I want, and we’ll see which one of us gets to the twenty-dollar window in time for the fourth race at Del Mar. On the goddamn radio that’s always playing in my bitch’s kitchen, I heard some East Coast big-shot author say he needs to jerk off before he can write. All is I can say is fuck that shit. I hate poets who beg you to like them because you feel sorry for them. Do not feel sorry for me. I won on Bitches’ Brew in the fourth and went home and drank a fifth of bourbon and got laid. ___________________________________________ David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford American Book of Poetry and series editor of . He teaches at The New School. A special thanks to for letting us use his photos [...]
Big Badness A dead CEO admonishes me to do what I love, which he can’t see me doing. I need only a clean place to lie around, to see a few decent things. You’re lucky if you have half of that, but which half. Also look up to see everything has gone a shade of purple which should only last a few minutes but goes on for an hour because of the clouds. And why is that, an equinox or its afterbirth staining everything some of the other words there are for purple. Go find them for me and keep maybe one for yourself, give them to me and invent more and I will acquire them, hand over the ones you were making and I will tell the world I invented them. They are mine (Lilac™, Violet™) and I will kill you to impress upon you that I can. ________________________________________ [...]
~ The way I see it, history as a subject reads best when it is both documented and re-imagined (In Cold Blood, Ragtime, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men come immediately to mind); when a literary revelation emerges as a result of source material from the scene and from the bigger world get all mixed up. Artistic freedom applied to the narrative of seeing the world gives historical events a kind of literary sense beyond the mere recording of something that happened in time. By nature, history is haphazard and at its core, personal. And I can’t think of any American poet who knows that fact as deeply and successfully as C.D. Wright who has, in a number of books, combined poetry with other kinds of writing to make a history about prisoners in Louisiana (One Big Self: An Investigation a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster), or America’s relationship with [...]
At a recent Poet’s House reading, Demosthenes Agrafiotis had some harsh things to say about haiku written in English. They fail not only because English can’t possibly pack as much information into a syllable as Japanese does, but the form itself is tied to a cultural imperative, a way of thought that one learns for so long that to even ponder how it works unravels the meaning. That said, is the closest thing in English, spiritually, to haiku that I can possibly think of. Sure, the poems are pithy and zazen, which is an easy link to the Japanese form. But these often tiny poems are ponderously gargantuan. Brian is a modern western ronin, wandering the new nature of urban living (as urbanized development has taken the majority of the Earth’s surface, it might as well be the modern rendering of nature) and living the poet’s path, sharpening his pen [...]
_______________________________________ M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poetry, The Lamp with Wings: Love Sonnets won The National Poetry Series, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, and is forthcoming in the fall 2011. He teaches ice hockey and ice skating lessons in Central Park, and lives in New York City with his wife, the poet, Margarita Delcheva. Related Posts “Via” by Amy Lawless Some David Schubert Poems You May Not Know Poem of the Week Doubleheader! Colie Hoffman & Maya Funaro How to Ransack a Poem for Parts Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds
One of the most curious aspects about poetry is that the element of “truth” presented in any given poem is never stable. With this in mind, the truth that the reader must accept at face value is constructed by the poet out of his or her organic impulses, and must be credible simply because the poet pronounces that it is. A question with which I have been wrestling for years is the idea that the poet and the “speaker” are possessed by two distinct and disconnected identities. What I find fascinating is that I can read a poem about death, sadness, and strife, and in some cases, the suffering of the speaker, and then meet and converse with the poet who always seems to be a contented and well-adjusted individual. This might evince the possibility that the speaker is not always espoused to the poet, but is rather something of [...]
This anxiety Walt Whitman has about poetry emerges in the poem “Song of Myself,” as Whitman seeks to establish a taxonomy of poetry, a system classifying what is good poetry, what bad, but the structure he establishes keeps collapsing. The poem is one Whitman’s fullest explanation of his theory of language and poetry, perhaps even more clear than the few prose pieces on the subject that bear his name, and it serves to show and highlight his theoretical conceptions, but also to show how his work pervaded by a fear, a deep anxiety about poetry that inflicts his poems. He works out, in the poem, a three-tiered idea of poetry. The lowest tier, the first level, is the poetry of refinement, and death. It is the poetry that actually goes by the name “poetry” in the poem, and reflects Whitman’s ideas about language, and how language can stagnate, separate from [...]
Last week we made the exciting announcement that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast was making itself a home at THEthe. In anticipation of the coming podcast, we are reposting the old episodes from the . Today we’re reposting , which features an interview with Joseph Spece. Joseph Spece, Part 1 Joseph Spece, Part 2 Note: The interview takes place at JC’s apt., so here and there you may hear mention of a picture of the Winged Victory in the living room or various trinkets on a counter in his bedroom.
We’re pleased to announce that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast is going to become the official podcast of THEthe! Scattered Rhymes is a long-form interview podcast in which poets discuss and read their work. Ben Pease has been doing the podcast for several years now and has created a back log of work that THEthe will be reposting over the next month or so in anticipation of Scattered Rhymes’ next installment. From that point on, we hope to make Scattered Rhymes a monthly endeavor. The latest episode will be posted and featured on THEthe and later archived at the . The first featured poet from the Scattered Rhymes podcast is Gail Mazur. Gail Mazur Interview, Part 1 Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version . You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Gail Mazur [...]
Listen to Joe Weil’s album of original poetry and music, recorded with the help of . Related Posts As If She Were a Symbol of Something Adam Fitzgerald’s “Life of Gorgias” Incantations: Michael S. Harper, A Love Supreme that gum you like is going to come back in style Briefly remembering
I’m happy to announce that we are rebooting our Poem of the Week feature here at THEthe. Every Thursday, THEthe will post a poem by an author that an editor has solicited. Every month, one of our contributors takes a turn at being the editor. Hopefully this will guarantee a nice diversity of tastes and styles. We hope that you enjoy this feature in the future as much as we think we’ll enjoy posting it. I (Micah) will take the reins for the remaining Thursdays of November. The inaugural poem of our relaunch is by Rosanne Wasserman. Enjoy! Limits Ow, why are walls so hard? Somebody’s mom could walk through them: Not every dream sequence needs dwarves, Though I get giants, like that Trevor Winkfieldian Unfolding himself from a pillow in Louisville, Half of a scissors-pair, wearing a boot, Human face inside handle-loop. We questioned him like an oracle: “What’s [...]
This entry is part of a series, Towards a Different Kind of Workshop» For beginning writers, rules of thumb are important. My goals are simple: 1. Get them to avoid cliches–not of thought (almost all thoughts are cliche), but of language and image. 2. Get them to play with cliche so that they master them rather than being mastered by them. 3. Teach them to vary sentence length against the line. 4. Teach them to be aware of word choice. 5. Teach them to know the difference between the concrete and the abstract, and all the hues and shades in between (a big mistake we make is teaching them to show, not tell without letting them know that the showing must tell–that an image must work for the poem. 6. Re-orient their sense of the “poetic” to include ordinary experience rendered in an extraordinary way, rather than extraordinary experience rendered [...]
Musicians, jazz musicians, keep fake books–at least they used to–with all the chord changes as well as written-down alternatives they may want to try. Why don’t poets keep fake books? I know Thomas Lux has his own personal anthology of poems he likes or is interested in. It’s a great idea. To make a good fake book, 1. Leave plenty of room in the margins to write notes. 2. Leave doodle space. 3. Keep the backs of the paper blank so you can write the poem out in your own hand, or write an answer to it, or a variation on it. When you write someone else’s poem out by hand, you get an entirely different relationship to the language–the line, word choice, etc. Here’s another strange practice, but one that appeals to me as a sort of loopy scientist: Read a poem once silently. Close the book, take a [...]
Adam Fitzgerald has been up to some crazy shit lately. Not only is the man a teaching, (Maggy) magazine editing, maniac, he’s also managed to put together a 100-page, 6-part poem collage in all that spare time he has. This is how Adam describes this piece: “The Gorgias” will have the first of six installments to be posted online. It incorporates poetry, collage, pornography, emails, Gchats, Facebook, and something I’m very excited about — music by STARS OF THE LID (an amazing ambient drone band that I’ve listened to for the past year when writing). The work is today. Check it out.